MVP voting results tell a bigger story about Nikola Jokic's future

The results are in, and in no big surprise, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander has won the NBA’s Most Valuable Player award for the second consecutive season. SGA led the Thunder to a 64-win season, the league’s best record, and put up a sublime 31.1 points, 4.3 rebounds, and 6.6 assists per game on remarkably efficient shooting.

Perhaps more surprisingly, Nikola Jokic was able to come away with another second-place finish, his third in six years, to go along with his three wins. That’s six straight seasons finishing first or second in MVP, an outrageous accomplishment for one of the greatest players that this league has ever seen.

The fact that the Nuggets dealt with ridiculously bad injury luck all season long, the Joker missed 16 straight games with the worst injury of his career, and he was dealing with a rookie head coach and front office, but still led Denver to 54 wins and a 3-seed in the West, is some outstanding stuff.

At the same time, these voting results are likely indicative of the beginning of things trending away from Jokic. He averaged 27.7 points, 12.9 rebounds, and 10.7 assists per game, averaging a triple-double for the second straight year. He led the league in both rebounding and assists, neither of which are things he has ever accomplished.

Beating SGA and Wemby will be nearly impossible going forward

And still, even with those comical, video-game-like numbers that rivaled the best of his career, he wasn’t even close to unseating SGA, who finished with 83 first-place votes to Jokic’s 10. There’s no way Jokic can keep up these outrageous statistical anomaly-type seasons for much longer, and in fact, it may not even be best for the team and the ultimate pursuit of winning a title. 

Whether by design or due to age, decline, and wear and tear, the numbers are going to go down, which makes it hard to imagine Jokic will ever win another MVP Award. There’s no reason to think that SGA, at 27 years old and leading an absolutely loaded perennial-contender in the Thunder, is going to fall off any time soon.

And perhaps equally, if not more concerning, Wemby is coming a lot faster than anyone expected. At just age 22, Victor Wembanyama led the Spurs to 62 wins and finished third in MVP with five first-place votes, nipping at the Joker’s heels.

With how well Jokic played this season, it may seem crazy, but there’s a very realistic chance that this was his last great chance to win MVP. It’s no knock on him, it’s just the way the league goes, and if Jokic wants to age gracefully, it likely means slightly diminishing his regular-season usage. It’s for the best for everyone. But MVP is a young man’s game, and those years may just be in the rearview mirror for the greatest Nugget of all time.

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